Pakistan’s literary output, in the last few years, has been so good it’s unsettling for Indian writers. If the likes of Kamila Shamsie, Uzma Aslam Khan and Nadeem Aslam took Pakistani writing in English to newer heights, the tradition continued with Moni Mohsin (The End of Innocence), Mohsin Hamid (Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist), Mohammed Hanif (A Case of Exploding Mangoes), Daniyal Mueenuddin (In Other Room, Other Wonders) and Ali Sethi (The Wish Maker). The country’s rich reservoir of writers is all set to expand this year with a handful of young talents raring to steal the literary limelight that they so richly deserve. Shehryar Fazli (Invitation) is one of them. (The other Pakistani author I will look forward to reading this year is Karachi-based Umair Naeem whose Drowning Shadows, a spiritual thriller, will be published by Amaryllis later this year).
Fazli’s Invitation, published by Tranquebar, is the story of a young Pakistani from Paris named Shahbaz who lands in the 1970s’ Karachi to settle a long-drawn-out property dispute. The climate of the city, which could smell the whiff of democracy, is volatile. Corruption and Machiavellian political machinations are rife. The power equations between the West Pakistani establishment and the East Pakistan of Bengalis are all set to be changed as the Mukti Bahini forces are beginning to start the Bangladesh Liberation War.
In his quest to settle the property dispute, Shahbaz finds himself pitted against his psychotic aunt, Mona Phuppi, who is aware of how things work in the country, unlike her young nephew, who can barely stitch together a sentence in Urdu.
Shahbaz is drawn into the world of Karachi’s aristocracy through the help of one of his father’s friends, Brigadier Alamgir who runs a cabaret — where dancer and seductress Malika, a foreigner, works and has Shahbaz ensnared from the moment she sees him — and hobnobs with the likes of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. For Shahbaz, it is important to have the brigadier’s continued patronage, for it gives him a sense of belonging in a city he had left 19 years ago after his father decided to migrate to Paris. But he has to pay the price for this patronage. And that price involves betraying his taxi driver friend Ghulam Hussain. As for the property dispute, he gets to solve it with a little help from an unexpetced quarter: the two Jamaatis who share the living space with Shahbaz at the brigadier’s place.
When Bangladesh comes into being and Bhutto’s Prohibition and ban on cabarets and his hanging follow, Shahbaz is already back in Paris. But he somehow can’t shake off the feeling that he was complicit in the crimes of a nation. Shahbaz had shaken hands with Bhutto once. And when his father breaks the news of Bhutto’s hanging, he wonders: “Was it that easy? The death of a giant, by the order of his own general. Could decay spread over a body so sated with power, driven by the highest appetites, exulted by a nation of a hundred million? I had the sense that something had finally collapsed, and something in me had collapsed with it.”
A bit about the novel’s genesis. Fazli started writing a novel when he was in college. Nothing of that novel survived — except for Shahbaz, the narrator. Fazli says that for some time, Shahbaz’s story didn’t have a specific setting, even a time period, but it did involve his return from West to East. “At its heart, I wanted to write about this character’s peculiar and eventually disastrous pursuit of a sense of citizenship. At the same time, I was studying Pakistani history and politics seriously for the first time, and became fascinated with the figure and mixed legacy of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto,” he says.
Fazli says he was fixated on that whole era, the country’s first “democratic transition” that was in part “derailed” the moment it began, with the failure to honour the election results which eventually provoked the country’s split and the birth of Bangladesh. “I suppose it was inevitable that I eventually made it the backdrop of Shahbaz’s story. The two fit together well,” he says.
While the novel is woven around Pakistan’s first general election, the central narrative is Shahbaz’s very personal story: rootlessness, his desire to belong, conform, be part of the crowd, and an act of betrayal that results from all of this.
Fazli says even Shahbaz’s seduction by the cabaret enchantress Malika has much more to do with the effects of exile, and being rootless. “This glamorous world that he’s introduced to in Karachi is what he could have been — and was supposed to have been — part of, had he not been forced into a long exile by his father 19 years before,” he says.
Although Shahbaz seems more than aware of the costs he has to pay for his proximity to the aristocracy, he does also envy the expressions of nationalism he sees in the people around him. Fazli says: “The idea of feeling so passionately about one’s own country is something he’s never felt. This discrepancy or conflict is central to his actions — or lack of action.”
Fazli sees Shahbaz as “worse than a mere spectator” because he repeatedly fails to act when he can. “No matter what he feels about the injustices he sees, his silence ultimately means consent. His voice, like his actions, is very restrained,” says Fazli, who was struck with the the idea of having a narrator who on the one hand is eloquent, and on the other struggles to communicate. He quotes Saul Bellow who used to say that his writing style eventually reflected this vision he once saw of running water from a hydrant; in other words, the language would gush. Bellow, of course, mastered that style. “But although he’s been a huge literary influence, the image I had in mind to evoke Shahbaz’s voice was not something gushing but rather something being compacted, tied up with string like a dozen plant stems. So that the language would be like a tight elastic band trying to tame something and that can only be stretched so far. But always with some spilling out, so that you get a sense of tension in his voice and witness occasional wild moments, as in his scenes with Malika,” says the author, a senior anyalyst for Brussels-based research and advocacy organisation International Crisis Group.
The characters Shahbaz sees around are high-spirited and freewheeling in many senses. But when faced with the demands of a political (“importantly, not popular”) minority, they reveal almost atavistic nationalism. Somewhere in the novel, Alamgir, the retired brigadier, says: “The nation’s story must go on.” Fazli says: “Who writes that story is, of course, the point.”
By the time Fazli was born, in 1978, he says the Karachi of this novel — the Karachi of bars and famous cabarets — had more or less vanished, largely due to the Prohibition introduced in 1976. Fazli says he has inherited the nostalgia of his parents’ generation for the Karachi of the ’60s and ’70s “despite, or especially because of, never having seen it”. He says: “For me, the Karachi cabaret has become the symbol of how things have changed since the ’70s. So it became a central venue in the novel early in the writing. It’s interesting that this comes across as ‘noir’. My intention was to capture a lost world.” It meant Fazli had to do his homework. But since he couldn’t get a hold of much written material, he relied mostly on conversations with people who used to go the cabarets, people who used to run them, photographs, film clips, and so on. “Eventually, this cabaret, which I now think of my cabaret, became very clear in my mind. I did similar research for the other parts of Karachi described in the book. In some ways that was more challenging, because today’s Karachi, the Karachi I’m familiar with, would always get in the way and I’d have to excise parts. But with the Agra, once I had it, I could more or less do as I pleased,” he says.
Fazli says since Shahbaz was a pretty “easy catch”, he never intended Malika to be this irresistible bombshell. “Physically, in fact, as Shahbaz describes her, she’s far from perfect. But yes, what he seems to covet through her is a taste of power just as much as sex. Despite the fact that she’s a foreigner, she’s a part of what’s going on in the city in a way that Shahbaz isn’t. So she, too, is a little nasty, manipulative, disingenuous. But that, too, draws him,” he says.
Pakistan’s great asset, says Fazli, is its pluralism — “a very compelling variety of ethnicities, languages, cultures, even religious practices”. He says that those who have always wanted a centralised state, however, view this variety as a threat. “At its worst, the centralising tendency, which formed the basis of an alliance between the military, civil bureaucracy and religious right, led to massacre, civil war, and the secession of more than half the country. Bhutto is interesting because on the one hand his government enshrined guarantees of provincial autonomy, both implicitly and explicitly in the 1973 constitution, on the other he was guilty of centralising power and sometimes violently suppressing provincial rights,” says Fazli.
But even Bhutto’s strongest critics feel, like Shahbaz does at the end of the novel, that something “very basic” collapsed with his hanging by Zia-ul-Haq’s military regime. And sometimes it’s mixed with a hint of guilt, as if to say, “We let it happen.”
Even though Fazli was born a year after Bhutto’s hanging, it still has a very personal effect on him to this day. With Shahbaz, he wanted to explore that feeling, both of something having collapsed, and of complicity in the collapse. “As a novelist my purpose wasn’t to reveal how those events might have come to be, but rather deal with the protagonist’s idiosyncratic relationship to them, a product of displacement, the feeling of being rootless, his rapport with his host, the retired brigadier, and the two clergymen who are also staying in the same house,” he says.